This invention relates in general to banking cards, and more specifically to cash card systems. The invention provides an "off-line" system for the transfer of funds in commercial, financial and trade sales transactions in which the transferee does not communicate with the fund holder at the time of a transaction.
Recent trends have pointed to the development of efficient electronic tools which eliminate the need for the use of cash, cut down on operating costs and speed the transfer of funds in every day business transactions requiring the exchange of money or checks for the purchase of goods, payment of services and any other transactions of similar character, and all this with complete security and a minimal risk of error or fraud.
Systems heretofore developed have certain limitations in that they are costly, complicated and cumbersome, the manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs are relatively high and the systems have limited use and high cost.
"On-line" systems in which each transaction is communicated to a central computer of course provide high reliability but are too expensive for practical use. "Off-line" systems in which transactions are stored at each terminal and periodically delivered or transmitted to a central facility are less expensive but lack the security and reliability of "on-line" systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,845,277--Voss shows a prior art "off-line" system that seems to be representative of the state of the art.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides an "off-line" cash card system that is efficient, secure and relatively inexpensive to provide and operate. Furthermore, the system is highly secure.
It is relatively less complex that known "off-line" systems and is both easy and inexpensive to operate and easily adaptable for universal use. The system provided by this invention can completely eliminate the use of cash money, invoices, multicarbons, monthly bills, payroll checks, deposit slips, mailing costs, reduce personnel-time-load-cost, balance book ledgers and all other paper with the exception of the customers receipt after each credit/debit transaction. The customer can acquire cash and/or purchases to the limit of their cash and credit balances for all commercial transactions by using a plastic card which can carry other selected major credit cards out of a possible 256 selections, up to a limit of 80 cards, thereby reducing the number of credit cards and/or wallet-load to one (1) card/person. Making it more convenient to carry and use and with which unauthorized deposits, and withdrawals make fraud or tampering, in the event the card is stolen or lost, practically impossible.
The basic components of the systems of the present invention are a cash card which is preferably of conventional plastic material containing a magnetic stripe on which the available cash balance, the owner's account number, credit and security information are recorded, and a transaction register which performs all the functions of a standard cash register including recording the amount of money received and exhibiting the amount of cash sale, and which also can read coded information from the card, store the information read, and encipher new information onto the cash card, updating the cash card in accordance with the transaction.
The cash card system provided by the present invention includes a novel "hysteresis" security arrangement. Each card is scanned upon presentation to read a numeric string which had undergone a random "mutation" when previously recorded onto the magnetic stripe. This numeric string, which can be read any number of times but cannot be accurately copied or re-recorded, serves as one of the enciphering keys for the data stored on the remainder of the magnetic stripe and enables the detection of certain efforts to invade the security of the system.
The transaction register records each cash transaction on a mass storage device, such as a magnetic disk, for later processing at a data processing central unit, with stored information being transmitted by telephone via a modem. Transmission preferably takes place automatically under timer control. The data processing center includes a computer, a disk file system and a printer for processing the information of the transaction register's disk and maintaining permanent accounts adjusted according to the cash card system transactions of the present invention.
To improve security by making copying as difficult as possible, a new numeric string enciphering key is recorded onto the magnetic stripe each time the card is used and this new key is then used to encipher the data to be stored on the magnetic stripe.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be made more clear by the following detailed description of the presently preferred embodiment of the invention, read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.